Iberia (106 page)

Well, these Salamanca bulls at Madrid looked fine. They were
big and in the corrals they comported themselves with dignity.
But they were very heavy and their fore knees were weak. Even
from the barrier Vavra could detect signs of weakness. ‘Those
knees won’t stand up in the fight,’ he predicted, and later when
these pathetic creatures came into the ring they made one or two
charges, as their taurine hearts commanded, but then their knees
gave out and they fell into heaps around the ring, too heavy to
get back up on their feet. The fight degenerated into a dismal
spectacle of one pass, bull down, haul the bull back up, another
pass, bull down again. Two of the poor creatures, their hearts still
willing but their legs played out, simply lay on the sand and
protected themselves by cutting swaths with their horns; to get
them to their weakened legs proved most difficult. The afternoon
was a travesty, the worst I’ve ever seen. My only consolation was
that long before the fight we had guessed that it would probably
be so.

As I explained in the chapter on Badajoz, I am loath to
introduce unfamiliar Spanish words which are not essential, and
foreigners who write about bulls offend in this respect, peppering
their pages with italic instead of information, but for what I wish
to say from here on, a limited taurine vocabulary is necessary,
with as many of the words as possible kept in English:

Torero includes all men engaged in the fight, whether matador,
picador, peon or banderillero.

 

Cuadrilla (crew) is the team working in support of one
matador. It consists of two mounted picadors who ride on horses
supplied by the ring, and three peons, who are called banderilleros
when engaged in placing the banderillas.

 

Corrida (a running) is the complete bullfight, customarily
consisting of six bulls from the same ranch fought by three
matadors. The senior man in point of service fights bulls number
one and four; the second, bulls two and five; and the junior, bulls
three and six. Since it requires about twenty minutes to fight one
bull, the corrida lasts about two hours. In June fights may start
as late as seven; in the autumn as early as four. I have often seen
acceptable fights on rainy days but never on windy.

 

Single fight is the action of one matador against one bull. It
has been described by earlier writers as a ritualistic drama in three
unequal acts, plus prologue and epilogue. One advocate of this
interpretation has said. ‘The prologue, which consists of the
matador’s testing the bull with the cape, might be thought of as
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, with its airy joy. The first act with
the picadors is heavy like
King Lear
. The relatively unimportant
but poetic second act of the banderilleros is
Twelfth Night
. The
stupendous third act, heavy with emotion and impending tragedy,
when the matador alone faces his destiny, is of course
Hamlet
,
while the overpowering epilogue of death can be likened only to
Aeschylus.’

 

Cape is the large stiff-fabric cloth, magenta on one side, yellow
on the other, used by the matador in the prologue and first two
acts and by the peons throughout. The bull will charge either
color equally

 

Pic is the long steel-tipped pick or lance used by the picador
in the first act.

 

Banderillas are the colorfully decorated short sticks with barbed
steel points which are placed in pairs by the banderilleros in the
bull’s shoulders.

 

Muleta is the red-flannel cloth, smaller than a cape, used by
the matador during the third act and epilogue.

 

Faena is the vital third act in which the matador exhibits his
skill with the muleta. Tradition requires that during the faena he
keep his sword in his right hand, which usually also holds the
muleta. Experts judge that the excellence of any single fight
depends about sixty to seventy percent on the faena, which can
excuse poor work elsewhere.

 

Kill is the tragic epilogue that ends the fight.

 

Let me make one thing clear. Most corridas are a
disappointment. Six bulls are fought, and of them, five are apt to
be so difficult that the matador cannot parade his skill. In all the
years I’ve been seeing corridas, only the six Benítez Cubero bulls
of which I have spoken gave a uniformly excellent show. No other
set has ever provided even as many as four good fights, and the
vast majority have provided none. Of a hundred corridas taken
at random at least eighty will be bores; ten will be reasonably
good; five will be unquestionably good; four will be worth
remembering; and one might be superb. Therefore, the
mathematical chances of buying a ticket on impulse and seeing
a good fight are at least four to one against. At one catastrophic
San Isidro feria in Madrid of sixteen fights, fourteen were very
poor and the other two barely acceptable.

 

At the Pamplona feria in 1966, government inspectors found
that sixteen of the forty-eight bulls failed to meet legal standards,
being either underage, underweight or with the tips of their horns
shaved off. Fines of 265,000 pesetas were assessed, and this in a
feria which was supposed to emphasize the excellence of the bull.
In the two hundred and fifty corridas I’ve attended my luck has
been poor, for I have seen even fewer good fights than the averages
would have indicated.

 

In watching a single fight I have said that it should be
considered as a ritual drama, and philosophically this is correct.
Occasionally one can receive from this tragic play a catharsis
precisely like that described by Aristotle, and that is why so many
foreign writers have been attracted to the bullfight. I have found
it more practical to see the single fight as a spectacle built up of
several identifiable skills, for in this way I can better judge what
I am seeing. A really complete single fight would consist of six
components, each performed with art, as follows: one, after the
bull enters the ring and has been tested by the peons, the matador
must initiate his part of the fight with a series of delicate and
artistic passes with his large cape; two, the bull must then three
times attack with resolute bravery the picador and horse, and the
picador must handle his lance properly; three, after each pic the
three matadors in proper turn must lead the bull away from the
horse and execute artistic and sometimes intricate passes with
their large capes; four, three separate pairs of banderillas must be
placed correctly and with art; five, the matador with his muleta
must build an artistic faena consisting of a series of linked passes
that make sense; six, the matador must kill proudly and honorably,
going in over the horn and finishing the bull with one thrust.

 

Well, that makes six components for each bull or a total of
thirty-six for an afternoon, and if on a given day you see out of
thirty-six as many as four items properly performed. you’ve not
been cheated. On some afternoons you see none. To see all six
performed well on a single bull is so rare as to be historic, and to
see the six performed well on each bull of the afternoon would
be positively impossible. It has never happened and never will.
At the beginning of the Pamplona feria in 1966, I had seen some
fifteen hundred bulls fought and had never seen one on which
the six components were properly performed, and I did not expect
ever to do so.

 

These doleful facts are summarized in a saying which reports
as a permanent truth: ‘Si hay toros, no hay toreros; si hay toreros,
no hay toros.’ (If there are bulls, there are no bullfighters; if there
are bullfighters, there are no bulls.) This applies equally to golf,
to love-making, to buying stock in the Xerox Corporation and
to most other human endeavors: ‘When everything looks right,
some one thing is bound to go wrong.’

 

For the uninitiated foreigner, especially one who loves animals,
a corrida is usually an unrewarding experience; he sees a confusing
spectacle in which the bull appears only as a necessary and
fractious evil who, after disrupting everyone’s plans, ends
ignominiously as a kind of animated pincushion. The animal is
without individualized personality; and it is not illogical for the
foreigner seeing his first fight to hope that the bull will catch or
even kill the matador, for that would introduce into the
mysterious rites at least a focal point of comprehension. But when
one has attended many corridas and has begun to catch a glimmer
of the intricate and subtle construction of a bullfight, he begins
to center his attention on the animal, and occasionally he will
sense the overtones of the tremendous drama being enacted before
him: the confrontation of man and primordial animal. The
devotee therefore finds something of interest in every corrida, for
this confrontation can take any of various forms and all are
challenging.

 

What have I found in the Spanish bullfight? A flash of beauty,
a swift development of the unexpected, a somber recollection of
primitive days when men faced bulls as an act of religious faith.
In the bulls I have found a symbol of power and grandeur; in the
men I have seen a professionalism which is usually honorable if
not always triumphant. I have never seen a corrida which did not
teach me something or which did not at some point develop
unexpectedly, and I am willing to settle for this limited experience.
No matter how disastrous the fight, and some of them can be
dreadful, there is the ancient drama of hopeful man and savage
beast and the mysterious bond that exists between them.

 

I have stressed the professionalism of the matador because
when one enters a plaza, having paid up to twenty-five dollars
for the privilege, he can be reasonably assured that if a good bull
thunders into the arena, the man facing it has served an
apprenticeship which taught him to give a decent fight. Since top
matadors earn enormous sums of money, say seven thousand
dollars a fight for eighty or ninety fights a year, the competition
is grueling, for the bullring is the traditional route by which boys
from impoverished families attain bull ranches of their own, and
fame, and wealthy wives. It is a matter of endless training, the
fighting of imaginary bulls day after day in the public parks of
Madrid or Sevilla. One boy grasps a pair of horns, bends over,
snorts like a bull and charges into the cape or the muleta held by
another boy. Hour after hour they practice, first one boy playing
the bull, then another. At home they practice passes before mirrors
to attain grace, and always they bum about the countryside seeking
invitations to those testing exhibitions in which the young heifers
of the bull ranch are thrown against picadors and matadors to
see whether they are brave or not. If the heifer charges the horse
bravely, and we have seen at Trujillo and Pamplona how these
scrawny, awkward beasts attack, driving at any moving object
time and again, she is set aside for breeding purposes. If the heifer
proves faulty or unwilling to attack when hurt, she is ticketed for
beef. (If you think for a moment, you will understand why it is
the heifers who are tested and not the young bulls; these animals
learn so quickly that if the males were tested with capes when
young they would remember, and when they entered the arena
against the matador they would kill him. Since the bravery of a
bull is determined primarily by his mother, she must therefore
be tested to see if she is brave; the father contributes only the
young bull’s physical conformation, and a visual inspection tells
whether it is satisfactory or not.) At any rate, the would-be
matador must seek out these testings to familiarize himself with
the bull family and to exhibit the skill he has learned in the parks
and before the mirror. Especially he must keep his ear tuned for
word of any village festivals in which improvised arenas are set
up in the main plaza, with upended carts forming the barriers
and boards protecting store windows, for at these rowdy festivals
wise old bulls are turned loose on which aspirant matadors can
try their skills without killing the animal. The bulls have attended
so many festivals they know better than the young fighters how
to position themselves and when to react to the passes. ‘That bull
speaks Latin,’ is a customary description. I once heard a young
fighter say, ‘After I gave him two good passes he tried to borrow
money from me.’ The Mexicans have a wonderful word for such
goings-on. Pachangas, they call them, and the syllables evoke the
madness; capeas they’re called in Spain, and they do not always
end humorously. Each year some aspirant is badly gored by the
canny old beasts and sometimes death results. But the competition
to become a full matador is so keen that young men must take
these chances.

 

Of a thousand boys who begin at age twelve to learn the
bullfighting passes, perhaps a hundred will succeed in fighting
one of the old bulls at a capea; far fewer will ever face a heifer at
a ranch. Of a hundred who progress to the point where they have
actually fought bulls as beginners, only four or five will become
big stars. The adverse odds in this profession are overwhelming.

 

But since the rewards can be overwhelming, each year the horde
of boys at practice remains about the same, and some very moving
literature his grown out of his drudgery. Anyone interested in the
purely seamy side should read Luis Spota’s
The Wounds of Hunger
,
which has been translated into English by Barnaby Conrad. It is
based on the saying that for a bullfighter the wounds of hunger
are more terrifying than the wounds of the horn.

 

There are several fine recent books on bullfighting, and as in
the case of Spain generally, the best are by Englishmen; Kenneth
Tynan’s perceptive
Bull Fever
, which analyzes the mystique of the
art; Angus Macnab’s
The Bulls of Iberia